EU angry over Polish draft roadmap

Talks at the UN climate summit in Warsaw are expected to continue into Saturday evening (23 November) as different factions argue over whether to agree a detailed roadmap, with clear deadlines for the two years until the Paris summit of 2015.

The UN’s members signed up to a timeline at the climate summit in Durban, South Africa in 2011, promising to agree a global deal in December 2015 that would take effect in January 2020.

This year’s summit must begin sketching out the contours of that deal.

This week Poland, which is hosting the talks and holds the presidency of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) this year, put forward a draft timeline for the next two years. But European Union delegations have reacted angrily to the draft because it includes no obligation for countries to submit emission reduction targets well ahead of the Paris 2015 meeting. Under the draft, the pledges would be reviewed at the Paris summit itself.

According to sources, the French delegation reacted furiously to the draft in a closed-door meeting of EU member states, saying that Poland is handing them the recipe for a failed summit. There are fears that if the exercise of reviewing the suggested emissions targets is left to the summit itself, it will collapse in the same way as the failed Copenhagen talks in 2009.

The EU has accepted the idea that countries may design their own emissions reduction targets rather than having them set by the UNFCCC. But these proposed targets must then be reviewed by the UNFCCC to determine if they will get the world to the overall goal of avoiding temperature rises above 2 degrees Celsius by 2050.

The European Commission wants the emission targets to be submitted in the first quarter of 2015 so there will be time to review them before the Paris summit.

However Poland counters that China will never agree to such a roadmap with such deadlines, and that it is better to set expectations lower in order to ensure a roadmap is agreed at the Warsaw summit. France fears this will doom the Paris summit to failure.

China and India have resisted the idea that the UNFCCC should be able to review the emission targets of the developing world. They say that if a gap is identified between what has been pledged and what is necessary, the responsibility should be on developed countries to increase their targets in order to bridge this gap.

However the United States is adamantly opposed to this approach. The US is supportive of the European Commission’s idea to require targets to be submitted early, according to sources.

Brazilian ambassador Jose Marcondes de Carvalho indicated today he is sceptical of setting due dates for targets. “We can’t set artificial dates,” he said. “What if this date is the worst possible moment for having a high level of ambition?”

This afternoon (21 November) NGOs staged a ‘walk-out’ from the summit, the first time such an event has been staged at a UN climate stage summit. They complained that rich countries are not taking responsibility for their historical contribution to climate change. The G77 group of developing countries staged a ‘walk-out’ of talks in the early hours of Wednesday morning over the same issue, although they returned the next morning.

“Countries like Japan and Australia have arrived in the talks backtracking on many of their commitments on emission reductions as well as on delivering funds to help developing countries cope with climate change,” said Jan Kowalzig, of campaign group Oxfam, as he was leaving the talks. “Europe is failing to get its act together, held back by a coal addicted Poland and Germany failing to lead.”

However centre-right German MEP Karl-Heinz Florenz, who is attending the talks, said he fears the bickering will lead to a failed summit. “More than 20 years of EU experience has shown me that he who walks out of a room needs to come in again, and he who closes a door needs to open it again,” he said. “We need to talk to each other.”